James West

Senior Digital Editor

James West is senior digital editor for Mother Jones, and before that, the senior producer for its reporting project Climate Desk. He wrote Beijing Blur (Penguin 2008), a far-reaching account of modernizing China’s underground youth scene. James has a masters of journalism under his belt from NYU, and has produced a variety of award-winning shows in his native Australia, including the national affairs program Hack. He's been to Kyrgyzstan, and also invited himself to Thanksgiving dinner after wrongly receiving invites for years from the mysterious Tran family.

This solar field at Apple Data Center in North Carolina, will be surpassed by the new California installation.

On Tuesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced a massive new investment by the company in solar energy: an $850 million installation that will cover 1,300 acres in Monterey County, California. Apple is partnering with First Solar—the nation's biggest utility-scale installer—on the project, which will produce enough power to supply 60,000 Californian homes, Cook said.

According to a press release from First Solar, Apple will receive 130 megawatts from the project under a 25-year deal, which the release describes as the largest such agreement ever.

Cook called it Apple's "biggest, boldest and most ambitious" energy project to date, designed to offset the electricity needs of Apple's new campus, the futuristic circular building designed by Norman Foster, and all of Apple's California retail stores. "We know at Apple that climate change is real," he said.

Cook made the announcement during a Goldman Sachs technology conference, and First Solar's stocks shot up this afternoon on the news:

Apple has already made huge commitments to solar. The Guardianreported last year that the company planned to use solar power to manufacture its new "sapphire" screens for the iPhone 6 at a factory in Arizona. Last year, Climate Desk joined the Guardian during a press visit to the biggest solar field then in Apple's portfolio. The Maiden, North Carolina, facility has 55,000 solar panels that track the sun across a nearly 100-acre field, offsetting the electricity sucked up by Apple's data center across the road:

Apple's new investment continues the startling growth of solar in America, which my colleague Tim McDonnell has reported on previously: By 2016, solar is projected to be as cheap or cheaper than electricity from the conventional grid in every state except three. Over the past decade, the amount of solar power produced in the United States has grown 139,000 percent.

In another portion of Cook's appearance, the CEO boasted about the ways Apple's new iWatch could help improve health by reminding you when you've become too sedentary:

Apple Watch can save your life? Tim Cook has his watch tap him if he's sitting too long, says "sitting is the new cancer" $AAPL

There are a ton of baby wombat videos on YouTube. Watch energetic wombats Jojo and DJ frolic after a feed in this video shot at the "Wild About Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation Center", in Victoria, Australia.

And, for a more serious take, watch Stephanie Clark and Wayne White, wildlife rehabilitators, talk about the long road to recovery for "Tunna"—orphaned as a baby after his mom was hit by a car—and the intricacies of releasing him back into the wild. Five months later, he's strong and healthy:

Expect more of that in a climate-changed world. That's the message from new research released Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Scientists have found that flood events in the Midwest have increased in number over the last 50 years. The researchers from the University of Iowa, funded by the National Science Foundation, studied 774 stream gauges across 14 US states and found that rivers over much of the region have burst their banks more often, resulting in more flooding.

According to the study, 34 percent of these gauges showed an increase in flooding events from 1962 to 2011, while only 9 percent showed a decrease. "The thing that I was surprised about the most was that there was such a coherent change" across the whole region, said one of the study's authors, Gabriele Villarini, a hydrologist and engineer at the University of Iowa. Villarni described it as "a very homogeneous pattern." That gave researchers confidence that the increase was the result of something more than simply localized weather or changes in specific watersheds, Villarini said. It was about bigger changes in the climate. There was "a nice, coherent pattern between rainfall and discharge" of rivers, he said.

While the study does not attempt to pinpoint precisely how climate change might be directly responsible for these increased flooding events, the scientists say in the report that the changes "can be largely attributed" to changes in rainfall and temperature, with shifts in land surface temperatures "potentially amplifying this signal."

Annual average temperatures (red line) across the Midwest are rising. National Climate Assessment, 2014.

That means the study's findings are generally consistent with how climate scientists describe one of the major impacts of global warming: As the atmosphere warms, it can hold more moisture, resulting in more frequent episodes of intense precipitation, and therefore flooding. Last year's National Climate Assessment reported that annual precipitation has increased over the past century, by up to 20 percent in some parts of the Midwest, in part "driven by intensification of the heaviest rainfalls." That trend is likely to worsen.

In an earlier national assessment conducted by FEMA, the government found that rising seas and more severe storms are expected to increase the areas of the United States at risk of floods by up to 45 percent by 2100. These changes could double the number of flood-prone properties covered by the National Flood Insurance Program and drastically increase the costs of floods, the report found.

Quantifying the economic losses in the Midwest is the next step for the University of Iowa scientists: "Over the next several months we'll be working on modeling the economic damages with these flood events," Villarini said, to get a more accurate picture of the devastation, and to help local governments prepare answer the question: "How do we move forward in a world when we have to make decisions today, for structures and projects designed for the next 50 years?"

The research comes at the same that time the White House is pushing new rules for America's flood-prone buildings, which put climate science at the center of federal regulations. At the end of last month, President Obama issued an executive order to implement a new "Federal Flood Risk Management Standard," designed to reduce risks and cut the costs of future flood disasters. But the president's plan is being met by Republican opposition—mainly from senators whose states border the Gulf of Mexico. These lawmakers question the legality of the executive order and imply that the White House didn't do enough to solicit input before drafting the order.

But is it safe?

There's a strange corner of YouTube where train-spotters post their conquests in exhaustive detail. It's one of the weirder YouTube holes I've been down in a while. But…oddly comforting. This video—of a Canadian National Railway locomotive making a meal out of snow drifts left by major blizzards in New Brunswick—is like something directly out of Snowpiercer, the 2013 dystopian ice age thriller set in a climate-altered future.

While certainly mesmerizing, there's an important issue to note that has gone unremarked upon since the video went viral. It's unclear what precisely the locomotive is carrying, but it's definitely pulling tankers. Its cargo may very well be oil, given that its destination is St John, New Brunswick, the location of Canada's biggest oil refinery, the Irving Oil Refinery. That refinery was the destination for the train laden with Bakken oil that derailed and exploded in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, in July 2013. The Lac-Mégantic accident killed 47 people and prompted calls across Canada and the United States for tougher safety standards for the booming oil-by-rail network.

Mark Hallman, director of communications for Canadian National Railway, refused to give specifics about the types of cargo being pulled by the train in the YouTube clip, calling it a "mixed freight" service. But Jayni Foley Hein, an expert on energy and transportation at the Institute for Policy Integrity, says crude is one likely possibility. "Its carrying the type of tankers that generally carry oil, and given its proximity to this refinery, it's certainly a reasonable prediction," she said.

Despite the soaring plumes of snow, Hallman told me that the train in the video was "totally safely operated," adding, "That's winter in Canada. That's what we have to deal with." The railway's own "Customer Safety Handbook" says that operators should take special care in wintry, snowy conditions: "Many of the service disruptions center on accumulations of snow and ice," says the handbook. "On the track, snow mostly constitutes a problem in switches, as well as at crossings—so once the snow is cleared, the problem is solved." In general, winter hits railway lines hard, contracting the tracks and making fractures more likely, according to Canadian National Railway.

A 10-year US Department of Transportation analysis of weather-related train accidents in America, from 1995 to 2005, found that the accidents related to snow and ice, when they did occur, often resulted in dangerous derailments. "During the winter months of December through March, the highest accident numbers arose from preexisting snow and ice conditions such as buildups that cause malfunctioning switches and derailments," the report found.

After the Lac-Mégantic disaster, both the United States and Canada agreed to get rid of the older and more dangerous versions of the tanker involved in that tragedy, the "DOT-111." (We covered the cons of this tanker extensively last May.) In mid-January, Canada announced it would take the tankers off the network years sooner than the United States will, putting the two countries at odds over increased safety measures on the deeply integrated system.

The dangers of carrying oil by rail have fueled a key aspect to the ongoing debate over the Keystone XL pipeline. When the US State Department issued its long-awaited environmental-impact statement on the project last year, one of its most significant findings was that if the controversial pipeline wasn't built, oil-laden rail cars would pick up the slack. "Rail will likely be able to accommodate new production if new pipelines are delayed or not constructed," it argued. (More recently, falling oil prices have led the EPA to question that line of reasoning.)

NBC recently reported that in America, trains spilled crude oil more often in 2014 than in any year since the government began collecting data in 1975.

The country's pollution could contribute to 257,000 deaths over the next decade.

If nothing is done to slash the levels of toxic smog in China's air, some 257,000 Chinese people could die over the next decade from pollution-related diseases, according to a new study released this week by Peking University and Greenpeace. That really is a lot of people; it's roughly equal to the population of Orlando, Florida, or Buffalo, New York.

The researchers analyzed the 2013 levels of what's known as PM2.5 pollutants—tiny airborne particles billowing from China's coal production and industry. They projected the number of "premature deaths"—from diseases like heart disease and lung cancer—that could occur over the next 10 years if 2013's level of pollution persists over the long term.

At the top of the list of China's most polluted cities, toxic air in the industrial hub of Shijiazhuang could be responsible for as many as 137 premature deaths per 100,000 people. The team found the average across the country's 31 populous provincial capitals was staggering:

The report comes amid renewed attention on China's smog crisis. Another Greenpeace study released earlier this month revealed that 90 percent of Chinese cities that report their air pollution levels are failing to meet China's own national standards, despite the government's self-declared "war on pollution," which includes measures to curtail coal use in big cities like Beijing, and to limit heavy industries.

If China met those standards, says Greenpeace in this latest report, nearly half of the premature deaths could be avoided.

The research is also notable because it was conducted jointly by China's best known and most prestigious university, Peking University (known locally as Beida), and Greenpeace, the international environmental advocacy group that has had a long and complicated relationship with China's authoritarian officials. The study was widely reported by state-run media, in another sign China's censors are loosening some restrictions around environmental reporting in the country in the face of intense public pressure for transparency.

The report adds to the growing amount of literature about the deadly impacts of the country's smog. An article that appeared in the The Lancet last year said that air pollution caused 350,000 to 500,000 premature deaths a year. An earlier Lancet study reported that air pollution caused 1.2 million premature deaths in 2010 alone.